Previously Hi-Tech Product Management.
Everything that is ground breaking in IT, communications, hi-tech, digital and human rights.
Note: All opinions,thoughts,impressions are mine and are not to be construed in any way as being representative of my current employer.

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Too much tech

Last week, I was in New Orleans for the CTIA Wireless 2005 conference. This was the happening place for Gizmodo-heads. Everyone who was anybody in telecom was there. It easily seems like the whole industry which was facing a slump is suddenly awake and alive with ideas. There were CxOs from all kinds of companies - service providers, applications, device manufacturers, chip manufacturers with a conspicous absence of systems integrators. Of course, the exception to this rule is the telecom unit of Patni where your's truly is currently employed.

The funniest part of this event was networking. With everyone having a cell phone stuck to their year, it was really difficult to have a normal F2F (face-to-face) conversation. On once occassion, I called the guy in front of me who was on another line and introduced myself as the person standing in front of him, just to get his attention! That worked!

OK, so after some experimentation in the best way to find information on my PC, I stumbled upon ViaPoint here. This is a new class of applications that are becoming increasingly prevalent - founded upon the new platform for the web - Google web services. ViaPoint simply extends desktop search and sits on top of the Google Desktop Search tool.

The goal as I understood it was to make it easier to categorize and provide a rich user interface to find your stuff. The concept is great, but falls pretty behind on the execution, IMHO. The scan process takes infinitely long, the install is a whopping 75 Megs and at the end of the day, what a Google can do with just 3 Megs seems more than the sloooow unintuitive interface that ViaPoint provides.